The Machine and the Psychoanalyst
The Freud who explains is about to retire. Artificial intelligence, if it doesn’t explain everything yet, soon will. Ask a language model to interpret a dream, and it gives you an answer instantly. Ask why you did what you did, and it returns a ready-made, personalized justification. It has never been cheaper to be right.
There was a time when this was, in part, the work of psychoanalysis. The analyst searched for hidden meaning, opened up a range of interpretations, and showed that beneath every word there was always more to be said. That work has now been industrialized. Today, the machine is the greatest producer of meaning that has ever existed.
But psychoanalysis stopped being concerned with that a long time ago.
Large language models are machines for linking things together; they can make almost any argument sound defensible, polished, and well written. It is rhetoric at its peak: discourse full of meaning and emptied of the real. A world of appearances seamlessly stitched together. Psychoanalysis does something else. It unstitches discourse. It does not add meaning; it returns to a person the weight of what they have said — including, and above all, the weight of what they do not know about themselves.
When someone justifies themselves through their traumas, their parents, or their psychiatric diagnosis, relief follows: the cause lies somewhere outside them. Knowledge, when it explains everything, excuses — it exonerates. The machine is the perfected form of this: an oracle that returns the cause and absolves. An analyst absolves no one. The analyst makes a person answer for what they invent from that which, in each of us, has no explanation. Psychoanalysis today, as the psychoanalyst Jorge Forbes puts it, is no longer that of the Freud who explains, but that of the Freud who implicates.
At this point, someone might object: the machine detects patterns better than anyone, and isn’t recognizing what repeats in a person, in the end, what an analyst does? In part, yes. Artificial intelligence is an extraordinary machine for extracting and extending patterns: it takes an ocean of words and gives back what repeats within it. At that, it is unbeatable. But detecting that something repeats is not the same as recognizing that the repetition is a unique — irreproducible — way of suffering and finding satisfaction at the same time.
The machine goes to the edge of intelligibility and, faced with the unknown, leaves the person there, hanging. It does not work with the open, with risk; its work is to close, even when it expands, because it cannot bear the consequences of what it produces.
To be an analyst, the machine lacks a body. And not just any body, the kind robotics promises to supply: a body that has passed through shame. The shame psychoanalysis deals with is not that of embarrassment, of the gaze of others — the kind an apology repairs — but shame before what in us cannot be deciphered, and is ours alone. Shame of the hole, not of the gaze. This shame is not there at the beginning; analysis is what gives it shape. And when someone, touching the indecipherable, instead of becoming paralyzed, invents a singular response and puts it into the world — bearing the lack of guarantee for what they create — what Forbes calls enthusiasm emerges.
Toward the end of his teaching, Jacques Lacan said that the interpretation that matters produces no meaning at all — it makes something else resonate. And that something else, he said, is the resonance of a body.
Noise is this: what is not a signal, what cannot be decoded, what vibrates in a body and resists translation, because it carries no message.
An analysis implicates two bodies. One experiences shame, and in that body, what words cannot reach makes itself heard. The other, having already undergone analysis, is capable — from the singular invention it sustains — of making the impossible to say resonate.
The machine produces meaning without noise: it is solid through and through; it has no hole. And without a hole there is no resonance chamber where something might vibrate. It can echo in a human body; resonate, it cannot.
This is why psychoanalysis is not competing with artificial intelligence. It works in another register, where the machine cannot reach: in the body that experiences shame — and that signs its name to what it invents in the face of the impossible.
The Freud who explains can retire. The Freud who implicates cannot.
Felipe K. Massaro, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst based in Brazil. He is a member of the Lacanian Psychoanalysis Institute (IPLA), affiliated with the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP).
